Energy refurbishment of social housing stock in Italy: analysis of some scenarios from the impact of climate change to occupant behaviour

In the period from the ‘40s to the late ‘70s, Italy has implemented extensive public social housing plan (INACASA and GESCAL) which is widely representative of the national residential building stock. Obviously, its energy performance is extremely poor and its refurbishment has a key role in the national targets of GHG emissions reduction. For these reasons, by historical research and survey of 145 social housing buildings, a building typology matrix with six reference building has been developed following IEE TABULA project method. Then, some typical refurbishment measures have been analysed, in term of global costs and total primary energy demand, considering different economics and climate change scenarios. The research has been carried out for Tuscany, central Italy, using both weather data sets for inland (Florence) and seaside (San Vincenzo). The input assumptions consider a constant thermal comfort level, in order to identify the measures which can provide comfort conditions to the occupants with the lowest value of energy demand. The results of this study, taking into account the impact of global warming on the Mediterranean climate, the high thermal inertia of typical buildings and different user’s behaviours, show that the combination of measures with advanced and standard performance level can be considered optimal in term of global costs reduction.